Kibbles & Bytes Blog

  • _Dear Friends,_

    Happy New Year!! Vermont pretty much missed the big snowfall last week. I talked to some friends in New York City who got stuck and were digging out their plowed-in cars with their hands and ice scrapers, and my co-author Kali got stranded in MD for a few days as the airports were closed and flights canceled up the coast.

    Up here in the north country, we got about two inches at the headquarters (not the dump we had last year, left). I have a contest running with my employees to predict the first one-foot snowfall at our Waitsfield store. One lucky employee is going to win two plane tickets to wherever they want to go!

    If I can stay up, I’ll probably head down to our neighbors for the traditional Prickly Mountain New Year’s Eve with lots of friends, champagne and dancing. I saw that our pond was shoveled off, so there will also be ice skating tonight (I’m definitely skipping that, though!).

    I’ll be heading west next week for the Consumer Electronics Show where I will be looking for new products and will be helping to man the Chill Pill Audio booth as we exhibit at this huge show.

    All of us here at Small Dog send our best wishes to you and your family for a healthy, happy and prosperous 2011! I am a half-full kinda guy and am really pumped about heading into a new year. I think 2011 is going to be a great year!

  • Protect Your MagSafe

    One of the most common things we see in our shop is MagSafe power adapters with damaged wire insulation and/or fraying where the…

  • Repair of the Week: Kernel Panics

    If you’ve ever seen your screen turn gray and display a message saying you need to restart your computer (in several languages), you’ve seen a kernel panic. These can be caused by software or hardware malfunctions, and it’s usually easy to figure out what type of malfunction by simply booting your computer off a known good installation of Mac OS X on an external drive.

    In our tech rooms, we actually boot computers over the network using NetBoot. If the kernel panics persist while booted over the network or a known good external drive, you have yourself a hardware problem.

    This case is a 17-inch MacBook Pro (with silver keys) that displayed the kernel panic screen while booted off the network. The first troubleshooting step is almost always to swap out the RAM. This time, RAM was not the culprit. Apple’s service manuals suggest running their diagnostic software at this point, but it did not come up with any defects.

    If you’ve ever used Apple Hardware Test on a computer that doesn’t boot up, then you understand how underpowered and inaccurate these tools can be. What’s available to service providers is only slightly more powerful than Apple Hardware Test, but generally is equally unhelpful.

    Kernel panics are tough to pin down, so the best approach is always to strip a machine down to a minimal configuration inside, and add parts back one by one. If the problem persists with the minimal configuration, it’s time to order a logic board. In this case, I added back the hard drive, optical drive, and AirPort card before the problem resurfaced. A known good AirPort card resolved the issue, and the customer was back in business in less than twenty four hours.

  • Apple Updates iPhoto to 9.1.1

    On Tuesday, Apple released iPhoto 9.1.1, which contained a series of bug fixes and a slew of minor enhancements for the company’s popular photo application.

    Following the launch of iLife ’11 earlier in the Fall, many early adopters griped over the seemingly reduced email functionality introduced in the software. Though email themes were one of the main features highlighted during the iPhoto portion of the ‘Back to the Mac’ keynote, the latest iteration of Apple’s longstanding application omitted support for third-party email clients–which seemed, to some, a step backwards.

    Thankfully with version 9.1.1, Apple has responded to user feedback and enabled support for third-party clients in addition to several other improvements. While tuning up the email portion of the application, Apple has also included several new themes as well as the ability to easily resize photos within email.

    While other changes are fairly minor, they are listed as follows in the support document accompanying the software update.

    * Adds a preference allowing photos to be emailed using an external email application
    * Adds “Classic” and “Journal” themes to email.
    * Photos attached to an email can now be sized to Small, Medium or Large
    * Improves reliability when upgrading a library from an earlier version of iPhoto
    * iPhoto now correctly preserves the sort order of Events after upgrading a library
    * Event titles displayed in headers can now be edited in Photos view
    * Addresses a problem that could cause duplicate photos to be added to a MobileMe album
    * Scrolling overlay now correctly displays ratings when photos are sorted by rating
    * Photos are now sorted correctly when a rating is changed and photos are sorted by rating
    * Fixes a problem that could cause text formatting controls to become inaccessible when editing a calendar

    Apple recommends the update for all users of iPhoto ’11 and has made it available both on their “download page”:http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1342 and through Software Update.

    Please note this update requires Mac OS X 10.6.3 or later, weighs in at 62.09 MB, and requires a copy of the iLife ’11 software suite. Per usual, we recommend running a Time Machine backup prior to installing any updates. If iPhoto ’11 has taught us anything so far, it’s that you can “never be too careful with your data.”:http://blog.smalldog.com/article/4006/apple-responds-to-iphoto-11-data-loss-issue/

  • Properly Protect your MagSafe Adapter

    One of the most common things we see in our shop is MagSafe power adapters with damaged wire insulation and/or fraying where the thin cord meets the power brick or where the cord meets the actual MagSafe tip. While many consider this the result of a design flaw (coupled with the fact that Apple __does__ offer free replacement in some situations), the simple fact is that these conditions are completely avoidable.

    It is my opinion that Apple’s offer to replace these damaged cords is more a customer service measure than a reaction to any design or build quality issue. I have three 85 watt adapters from the original MacBook Pro; they are the larger variety, about four years old, and in fine condition. The logical solution is to not let there be tension at the two crucial points of the cord.

    Most commonly, fraying at the power brick end is the result of wrapping the thin cord too tightly when the adapter isn’t in use. *Wrap it more loosely, and wrap it such that the cord remains perpendicular to the power brick.* This eliminates the strain. The same principle applies for the MagSafe tip end: *keep it perpendicular to the computer to eliminate strain, but also never pull on the cord to remove the plug from the power port.*

    “Replacement adapters”:http://www.smalldog.com/search/?find=magsafe+adapter are $79.99.

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  • Thank you for reading this issue of Kibbles & Bytes. Merry Christmas to all! Your Kibbles & Bytes team, Don, Kali, Ed &…

  • Do I Really Need Malware Protection?

    __Note: This article was a popular post in our last Tech Tails, so we have posted an excerpt here. For the full article, “click here”:http://bit.ly/gxreWK to go to our blog, Barkings! -KH__

    I occasionally get customers who say their systems are running very slowly. They may be brand new or a couple of years old, and the actual cause varies. Maybe they upgraded to the latest version of an application and now need more RAM. Maybe their hard disk is running low on space, or perhaps it’s failing. Quite often, it’s because they installed a bunch of applications that are auto-launching at login.

    Every so often though, I will get someone who has done a little research on the web and has convinced him or herself that they have some sort of virus or spyware and want to know how to get rid of it. Just for the record, it is __highly__ unlikely that a virus is the cause. In order to understand why, there are a few key points to know regarding the differences between Windows and OS X.

    …

    How does malware infect a computer? To understand that, a few definitions are in order.

    Malware is an encompassing term which includes viruses, spyware, and adware, and is used to describe any program that serves no purpose other than to make your life miserable. A virus in computer terminology is an application designed to replicate itself and spread to other computers, typically causing data loss of some form.

    Spyware collects information about you and sends it to some outside entity without your knowledge or approval. One form of spyware, known as a keylogger, will record what you type in order to steal logins and passwords.

    Adware is an application that puts pop-up advertisements on your screen, trying to get you to buy things you don’t need or visit sites you were better off not knowing about. In most cases, adware is a harmless annoyance, but it can slow your system down.

    “See the rest of the article here.”:http://bit.ly/gxreWK